Date: 21 September 1903
Pages: 250-251

25.
30/IX 1903 [Geneva]

...You write: "I have lived too long in this world not to know that in such cases the truth is not on one side only, but on both."

I grant that fully. The trouble is only that that "side" does not realize its new position, its new basis, and demands what was easily achieved in the old way (albeit after months of struggle), and is now impossible. The basis *) has become different—this is a fait accompli **); but they are still guided above all by how insulting this or that was at the Congress, how wildly Lenin conducted himself, etc. There was something to it, no denying it, and I directly acknowledged my own "wildness" in a letter to Starover.2) But the point is precisely this: the results achieved by "wild" struggle are not wild at all, and that side fights and fights out of wildness against the very results themselves, against inevitable and necessary] results.

You, after all, have long known what things were leading to. You know how you expressed your firm conviction about the hindrance from certain "old-timers,"3) and you will certainly not doubt that the unfortunate "troika"4) is not a trick, not a Jacobin coup, but a direct, natural,] and the best—by God, the best—way out of three years of "tearing-apart." The troika is built on 3 corners and eliminates every ground for tearing-apart. You know how far impressionability and "personal" (instead of political) attitude toward affairs—Martov + Starover + Zasulich—could go, when they, for instance, altogether "tried"5) a person politically for a matter of purely personal character.6) You then, without beating about the bush, took the side of the "brutes and villains."7) But this is altogether, altogether typical. For now too—the root is the same, the same confusion of personal and political,] the same suspicion of us in desiring to taint personally, though we are only shifting (and moving) politically. And when you remind me: the fault must be on your side too—I answer: I do not think of denying the personal, but one need not demand a political] correction for this. It is precisely in this that lies the complete hopelessness, the utter hopelessness of the situation—that for a sum of personal insults, personal discontent with the composition of centers, they demand a political correction. Tout ce que vous voulez, mais pas de ça *)!

And if one is to consider the cause a political] divergence (as some wish), is it not then absurd to demand for "peace" cooptation of a larger number, or at least an equal number of political] opponents...? It is absurd to the *plus ultra**)!

And the small case I cited above from a great series of tearing-aparts is typical not only in its substance but also in the form of its outcome. Do you know how we prevailed then?7) We were in the minority, and we prevailed by persistence, by threatening to bring it "to everyone." That is what they think now: we are doing the same thing. The trouble only is that now is not then. Now the formal basis is ineradicable. Were there not this formal basis—why not six, if people have already reached white heat? We suffered for 3 years, we will suffer for another 3; we decided not by votes, but by persistence—you will decide by persistence now as well. But now this cannot be—that is the point.8) And they stubbornly refuse to see and understand this change. This is what makes the situation hopeless. Now the dilemma stands inexorably: either divergence on the question of persons—then it is absurd to make a political] scandal out of this and abandon the work. Or a political] divergence—then it is all the more absurd to "correct" it by forcing certain persons of, say, a certain nuance.

They are taking now (supposedly taking) the second. Then let Martov enter the troika and prove before the party the errors of the 2-member collegium: otherwise, how can you obtain the data for exposing these errors and warning against them

*) — anything you wish, but not this! Ed.
**) — to the utmost, to the last degree! Ed.